Friday, September 17, 2004

I've been meaning to post an alert to this story for ages - Senator Ted Kennedy somehow got himself on the US government's "no fly" list.

"A senior administration official, who spoke on condition he not be identified, said Kennedy was stopped because the name "T. Kennedy" has been used as an alias by someone on the list of terrorist suspects.

While he worked to clear himself, Kennedy kept having to wait in terminals at Reagan National, Boston's Logan International and at least one other airport, his staff said. All of the flights were on US Airways. When the senator checked in at the counter, airline employees told him they could not issue him a boarding pass because he appeared on the list. Kennedy was delayed until a supervisor could be summoned to identify him and give approval for him to board the plane."

Thursday, September 16, 2004

"By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks."

The Consumers Association in the UK have decided to refer the Apple iTunes service to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) for anti competitive practices.

'Consumers' Association's main areas of concern are that the practice of residency based price discrimination frustrates consumer benefits possible under the single market and that the iTunes system allows market abuse, going against the principles of the single market.

When CA asked Apple to justify the price differential, they responded: "The underlying economic model in each country has an impact on how we price our track downloads. That's not unusual, look at the price of CDs in the US versus the UK. We believe the real comparison to be made is with the price of other track downloads in the UK." '

Monday, September 13, 2004

TiVo and ReplayTV have agreed to implement technological restrictions to digital video recorders. The more I think about this kind of thing the more surreal it appears to be. What is the logic in restricting the products you supply to the market, reducing your customers utility purely to serve the interests of dominant players in a related market? All of this is bound to eventually collapse in on top of itself.

The new head of so-called e-government in the UK, Ian Watmore, is very keen on national identity cards and single ID numbers for all citizens. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

Theoretically, for example, a single ID number would make his job of joining up the IT dots for government significantly easier. That's something that is often neglected when it comes to grand schemes like ID cards or complex security systems. The agenda of the individual actors has a significant part to play in the position they take on any issue.

That it may be helpful to Mr Watmore in meeting whatever targets he might have, however, does not necessarily mean it is in the general interest of the rest of us.